Standing at this intersection of data science and social science is Dr. Ning Yu, a researcher in this emerging field of #SPSM, with a focus on big data and data science. Dr. Yu received her PhD in Information Science and Ph.D. minor in Cognitive Science with an emphasis on Computational Linguistics at Indiana University. She is interested in investigating the feasibility and efficiency of computational approaches, machine learning and NLP included, in understanding big data in the real world: from retrieving opinions in blog posts, to predicting ratings for online recipes, to understanding public attitudes towards suicide. She is also interested in network analysis and information visualization, which goes hand-in-hand in generating big pictures for social data.

Dr. Yu writes, “With access to endless user generate data on social media or via smart devices, researchers including myself have the power they never had before to observe how people behave in their everyday life and even to understand why they make certain decisions. In the past two years at UK, I have developed two interrelated “big data” research tracks : 1) Text mining with a focus on sentiment analysis. This track carries on my research from graduate school and focuses on general methodologies for automatically extracting sentiment, emotions or other categories from large amount of textual information; and 2) Web mining for suicide prevention. (Do you know suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S., claiming 38,285 lives in 2012?) By analyzing user generated content on the Web, this second track applies a broad range of Web mining technologies including those designed in the first track to understand the public perceptions and attitudes towards suicide, to identify possible new warning signs associated with suicide, and to evaluate the effectiveness of suicide prevention programs/campaigns.”

Dr. Yu will be taking our questions, but she also has questions for our community, to better inform her own research contributions to suicide prevention. Please join us to grow expertise in this area of suicide prevention!